Most likely, the victims were all younger because older people were still taking aspirin.
The 1982 Tylenol poisonings panicked the nation. Bottles were pulled off shelves across the U.S., and a massive criminal investigation got underway, hunting for the person who tainted the popular p…
www.chicagotribune.com
One was a school girl who woke up sick with the flu.
One was an instance where a man (Janus) took Tylenol for a headache or something. He died at the hospital that afternoon where EMS had taken him. The next day, his brother and newlywed wife came to his home to help his wife and mourn the loss of his brother. Both the brother and his wife, feeling they had headaches or something, took Tylenol capsules from the bottle his brother had just used. They both died, too, later that night. The widow was there with them, but no one was aware yet that it was the Tylenol causing the deaths.
Mary McFarland worked for Illinois Bell telephone. She had just taken a Tylenol at work. I think it was a bottle the employees kept in the break room. She told a co-worker she felt dizzy, then collapsed. Died later.
Paula Prince was a single woman, a stewardess for United who also had a party planning business. On her way home one night, she stopped at Walgreens to buy a bottle of the Tylenol. The next day when her friends looked for her, she was found dead at home. Later, LE found store video from when she purchased the Tylenol. A man in the photo was later investigated, but found innocent.
It was a county health department worker who discovered and made the decision that all the people had died from the Tylenol. They pulled it all off the shelves, sent out an alert and LE investigated. They narrowed it down to all the bottles coming from a shipment that originated in a local warehouse/distribution center and delivered to local drug stores. IIRC, they found that the poisoning hadn't taken place at the manufacturing plant because more than one shipment was delivered from that batch. Tylenol shipped at the same time to other areas in the US was not contaminated, only the warehouse in Chicago.
So, someone either spiked some of the bottles at the warehouse or they went around to various stores in Chicago, bought or took bottles off the shelves, took them home and spiked them, then returned them to the shelves.
Each of the contaminated bottles contained more than 1 capsule that had been tampered with.
ETA: Updated some info. about the shipment and warehouse. Also, many people followed this story very closely. The journalism/reporting on this was excellent. Reporters really stayed with the story, Chicago got all the health alerts out quickly and with great detail about how they think it happened. Everyone did a very good job keeping the public updated on what happened and how it probably happened. I remember lots of safety warnings to the public. Throw out your old medicine. Everyone temporarily stopped making OTC medicines with capsules that could be tampered with. Safety seals and wrapping became a thing.
The Chicago Tribune did an excellent series on this last year and I refreshed my memory by reading it.